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Shai Agassi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In a surprise move, Better Place has ousted chief executive Shai Agassi, the charismatic founder of the electric car infrastructure company that has raised nearly $1 billion to build a network of battery switching stations in Israel, Denmark, Australia and other countries.

Better Place’s board named Evan Thornley, chief executive of Better Place Australia, as the company’s new global CEO.

“Under Shai’s leadership, we’ve successfully achieved our goals in the first chapter of Better Place, and we owe Shai our gratitude for turning his powerful vision into a reality,” Idan Ofer, the Israeli billionaire and Better Place chairman, said in a statement. “It is almost five years to the day since Shai launched Better Place and a natural point in the company’s evolution to realign for its second chapter and for the challenges and opportunities ahead.”

Young, telegenic and fervent, Agassi was the public face of Better Place, appearing at countless conferences as he enlisted the support of heads of state and business leaders for his vision of weaning the world from oil. He remains a Better Place board member.

In recent weeks I’ve interviewed Agassi and Ofer and neither man hinted at turmoil behind the scenes as the company launched electric car networks in Israel and Denmark.

“As far as I’m concerned, Better Place has proven what it set out to do successfully,” Ofer, Israel’s richest person, told me during an interview at his Manhattan duplex three weeks ago. “It’s abundantly clear that it works and it works well and everything we set out to do from day one we’ve actually done. There isn’t a single issue that was put into the business plan that we haven’t done.”

Better Place has lost $490 million since its founding, according to financial reports filed by Ofer’s Israel Corp., which is major shareholder in the startup.

Israel Corp. has invested more than $200 million into Better Place and I asked Ofer how long he was prepared to wait for the company to turn a profit.

“Money needs scale,” Ofer said. “The faster we scale up and refine the model, the faster we’ll be making money. I would say there’s probably two years, three years to go.”

“That’s not what concerns me,” he added. “What concerns me is that I want to scale as fast as possible and I want to be all over Europe.”

He noted that his investment in chipmaker Tower Semiconductor took a decade to pay off.